Brave has explained in a press release — “Why Brave disables FloC” — how Google’s proposed alternative to third-party cookies, a user segmentation system called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, will not work for users of its open-source browser.
Brave’s move aligns it with the DuckDuckGo search engine (although DuckDuckGo can block Google’s system even when using its own browser, Chrome) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which recently published an article calling FLoC a “terrible idea”.
Why the widespread antipathy toward FLoC? It’s Google’s replacement for third-party cookies, which, according to them, allows for advertising personalization without sharing…
A lengthy article in The Wall Street Journal, China creates its own digital currency, a first for major economy, outlines the likely impact of Beijing’s initiative and the strategic possibilities it offers in terms of avoiding US blockades of its companies, how this will boost its role in international transactions, while allowing it to monitor its economy in real time.
Stablecoins, or digital currencies linked to a specific asset or basket of assets, are seen by many as the step prior to introducing cryptocurrencies: centralized and controlled by a regulator, whether a central bank or some other type of official…
Elon Musk made some interesting comments a month ago about Starlink, the satellite communications company launched via SpaceX, saying that his plan is to create antennas for use on trucks, ships and planes to provide internet to vehicles of a certain size, though not yet to cars, due to the size of the antennas.
Musk continues to disrupt the telecommunications industry: using the idle capacity in his rockets to launch waves of up to sixty satellites at a time has already allowed him to have 1,321 in orbit at a much lower cost than than is usually associated with these…
When, in February 2013, Alex Chung and Jace Cooke, during a relaxed breakfast conversation about how boring many conversations on the web were, decided to create a search engine for animated GIFs, they never thought that such a simple idea would become one of the most visited and fastest-growing sites on the web. However, when in the first week of its creation, the site attracted more than one million users, they began to realize they were on to something. In August, they expanded so that users of first Facebook, then Twitter, and later, after a $2.5 …
We all know one: people we imagined to be intelligent, or at least not idiots, who suddenly enter a downward spiral of believing conspiracy theories, unlikely news stories, revealing “studies” about things “we all know”, but which for some strange reason — like the views of a few “scientists” who dare to tell the truth — -never make it into the mainstream media (that’s because they’re part of a cover up). They constantly retweet a few accounts, sharing their content through all the means they can: Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal — “because WhatsApp censors us.” …
A few days ago, thanks to my algorithmic recommendations — not from the sources I usually read, but selected on the basis of subject matter of interest to me — I came across an article about a 57-year-old American who after being released following a 37-year jail term, was asked about his impressions of something as commonplace as a smartphone, or the internet.
The man entered prison at the age of 20, in 1983, when a cell phone weighed more than a kilo and was bigger than a brick, and when no one outside military or very academic circles had…
As we begin to see the end of the pandemic and the normalization of labor relations it’s worth thinking about the future of a habit many of us have developed over the last year: videoconferencing.
Services such as Zoom are now the channel many of us now use to communicate with each other: what was unthinkable before the pandemic and reserved for very specific issues, is now an option used by many on a daily basis. At the beginning of the pandemic, the company enjoyed a huge increase in growth thanks to being in the right place at the right…
One of the most common complaints of internet users is the feeling of being spied on. In response, the New York Times is suggesting its readers use browsers such as Brave that offer greater privacy in the face of intrusive advertising.
The strategy of advertising things we have previously shown an interest in by searching or reading on another seemingly unrelated page hasn’t worked for a long time, if it ever did. Fed up with being hassled at every turn, people are increasingly hostile to the approach.
What is it specifically we don’t want, and what should we do to…
I’ve been keeping an eye on the use of machine learning algorithms, particularly by venture capitalists, to make investment decisions for some time now. They’ve been investing in machine learning companies for years, so applying their products to other businesses, once you have studied how they work, seems a reasonable proposition.
After all, what is the decision to invest in a startup based on? Basically, the fruit of a set of analyses and previous experiences that can be systematized and verified in different ways, while the experience corresponds, in reality, to the imperfect distillation, with its biases and errors, of…
In the wake of 2015’s dieselgate scandal, Volkswagen’s image was sorely in need of a makeover. The company’s brutal attack on the principles of corporate social responsibility made it for some time a pariah in the eyes of much of the public, although its sales were never affected.
So Volkswagen’s management decided to commit to electrification, based on the belief that if it didn’t it would “end up like Nokia”. In a bid to avoid fines resulting from the change in emissions standards planned for this year, Volkswagen said goodbye to hybrids in 2019, accelerated its electric vehicle manufacturing targets…
Enrique Dans
Professor of Innovation at IE Business School, blogger at enriquedans.com and Senior Contributor at Forbes
